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In a kingdom whose currency is the chicken, you must lead a brave chicken in his journey to take over humans.
I'm quite happy with my 2nd Ludum Dare, even though it has some glitches (be warned).
Hey everyone! I finally got the leaderboard functionality working for my shooter game, "Darkling." I achieved this with the help of an amazing free service called DreamLo. Definitely look into that if you want an easy way to implement an online high score or leaderboard for your game!
That being said, I only have a downloadable PC version available right now, because saving/loading usernames in a WebGL application has proven to be a bit more complicated (that's coming soon, though).
In the meantime, please consider trying out the game and seeing how far you can get on the leaderboards! This is my first time building an online leaderboard, so please play it and give me any feedback whatsoever! Thanks guys!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfw5cycJ9u0
My game has received about 18 votes, so please vote it!
I am happy of how this jam has gone. I like most of the games i tried.
There... at last, the Post Mortem for Necromarket. Where to begin...
Hailing from The Netherlands and England, Ludum Dare begins at 3:00am and 2:00am for us, respectively. We defy this and just sleep whatever sleep we would normally be sleeping. For this jam, this meant we didn't get together on our Discord until 11:00am.
At this point, the first day had started and we began brainstorming. Many ideas passed by, including: * You Are a Piñata and Have To Survive Beatings From Children, with your candy innards being a form of currency that you could spend on upgrades. * A Papers Please style game where you are St. Peter at the pearly gates and you have to judge incoming souls. * A Trolley Problem game where you have to decide which group of people to run over with your little tram, capturing their souls and being paid out and penalized at the end of a level.
Eventually, we decided on a crafting/trading game where you would imbue magical items with your own life force in order to sell them to adventurers. And thus, Necromarket was born.
I am the artist of our crew, so I started on figuring out what the perspective our our game would be. The location was to be a store with some kind of magical altar where the player would craft their items. I blocked out some basic ideas to start from.
We would be putting together the game space using Tiled so my goal was to make a spritesheet with 32x32 pixel tiles to put together the background with. For inspiration and ideas, I had a look at games like Moonlighter and Graveyard Keeper, as well as a memory of a previous jam game by @ellian called Good Impressions. I used the AAP-64 palette by Adigun Polack, and at the end of this first day, I had basic background tiles, non-animated and forward-facing player and customer sprites, and a bunch of items.
The items were an odd problem to tackle. I was making them as if they were inventory icons, but they would be used in the game world instead. This makes them a bit more abstract rather than having them be held naturally by the player, but since we have large objects like unicorns and imps, as well as small objects like potions and boots (compared to the size of the player's feet, the boot sprites are huge) it makes sense to keep them more conceptual rather than accurately scaled to the player character.
This is where the "fun" began. It was animation time. Mistake número uno: I should really have planned this better, figuring out how many frames I would need in total beforehand, but instead I just started instinctively. First, the downward walk was a six-frame animation that I made without reference and just using previous experience. It came out a little janky, so I looked up a tutorial by Bandygrass that I had used as reference before for the other directions . I made my eight-frame sideways walking animation without questioning whether it was the right idea for this project.
My second mistake was sticking to this eight-framer even when I realized it would take a lot of time. You see, our player can use magic to change from an elderly grampa to a middle-aged man, a young adult and a child. So this multiplied the total frame-count for the player character by four. We wanted to make them look pretty unique, instead of just replacing the head, so each age category required a lot of modification.
Obviously, the best way to do this would've been a basic four frame animation for each direction. The character moves pretty quickly across the screen, and eight frames wasn't necessary. I did only make four frames for the upward animation, but I should have reduced the sideways animations at the same time. All in all I estimate about 75% of my time on day two was spent on animating the player character, resulting in a total of 104 animation frames.
I had to go to work on Monday. Luckily, @daanvanyperen managed to wrangle his own work schedule so he could have some extra hours on the game. When I came home, he had thrown a number of temporary sprites onto the spritesheet that I then replaced with the final art. I pretty much directly took his quick sketches as a base for the final art, which sped up the process. After two days of gamejam and a day at work, I didn't feel super creative anymore.
Then came the realization: "Wait, the player needs to have animations where he's holding the items!" Arms up in the air. This means 208 animation frames for the player character. I asked myself, "Is it necessary to have this variation of the player character? We could just have the items hover overhead." I then answered myself, "Yes." I felt it was of sufficient importance to clearly show the items are held and carried by the player this way. I did get a little sloppy with my modifications here and there, but there was leeway there given the movement and pose would camouflage imperfections somewhat.
Then at some point, we had a completed entry. Sufficiently complete, anyway. The jam ended, and we submitted somewhere around the one-hour-left mark.
Like I mentioned above, a major pitfall this time was the amount of animation frames I ended up having to do due to not planning and not adapting. This was a big time sink. Because the player character took so much time to animate, I did not make any animations for the other characters in the game. The hag, Sam the postman, and the single customer all just slide onto the screen. It doesn't bother me much, it kind of has a cool vibe to be honest, but it makes things less lively.
Secondly, I neglected a big lesson I learned and even blogged about (see the last paragraph) from Ludum Dare 43. I did not go all-in on the core theme. @daanvanyperen even told me early on, when I only had a single player character sprite done, that the player character didn't look very wizardly. He literally reminded me of this big lesson I had learned, and I sort of brushed it aside because I subjectively liked the idea of him looking more like a craftsman. I did make the older variant look more like a necromancer with his little skull for a belt buckle, but that again was a direct result of Daan suggesting we need more skulls. The game is called Necromarket, after all!
And with that, the shop should look more like a magical dungeon of sorts. I think I let myself be influenced by looking at and Dungeon Keeper a little too much, and the walls just look like a generic medieval house. Where even are the magical bookcases?
If I could go back and pause time, I would... * Reduce player frames to 4 for each direction. * Re-theme the player character to be more of a wizard/necromancer. * Animate the other characters as well (only upward and downward directions necessary). * Have more customer variations, in-theme with the story. * Replace the generic background tiles with a more suitable magical workshop. * Make the enchanting altar more of a focal point and champion/landmark visual asset.
I do! Lots! Pretty much everything turned out sufficiently cool-looking and I am proud of my work. Lots of room for improvement doesn't mean that the work I did do was bad. I am even happy that I managed to do the number of animation frames, even if I regret doing so many.
But, looking at the art I did I am quite pleased with the little chicken coop animation. Out of everything, that and the little orb of vitality you can use instead of your own life force for crafting items are somehow the ones I probably enjoyed animating and now enjoy looking at the most. Oh, and the dragon heart. Man I like that dragon heart sprite so much.
I think I more or less ran out of things to say here. I will gladly answer any questions anyone might have, of course. Here in the comments, through Twitter or in the Ludum Dare discord; I am pretty easy to locate. Also, given that this Post Mortem is all about graphics, I will also drop my Pixelart Timelapse video here again, seeing as it's particularly relevant.
If you read all of this, thank you for reading! I hope it's been of some use, or at least provided an entertaining insight. Oh, and if you feel like having a go at the game, here's Necromarket!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roxihAjI8O0 Direct link here
Say somfings...
Play our game.
https://youtu.be/R7BOX3NtoYs
Come hit things HERE:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/batclash
Face for Death is a 2D runner platformer videogame developed for the April 2019 Lumdum Jam, in where you play a two-faced coin with personality disorders who has to scape from a city plenty of evil and greedy rich dudes.
We keep working on a modular level generation protoype and some of the mood we want to give it. Most of core mechanics are working on now, some music and sounds were implemented and it would be scaled soon. In next step we will be bussy in level modules design and probably we will introduce at least a pickeable item and auto-ranking, in order to give it some playability.
Havent played yet? Come and show us how long can you reach!.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/face-to-death
Don't let them catch you and rate, feed is allways wellcome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ltSK3fmc5o
I really should have started on the play+rate cycle a lot earlier, but like I mentioned before, I got sick, and then work got crazy. But I have time to play some games today! If you're a few votes short, hit me up.
Well, didn't finish post-mortem yet, but look at this!
That's right, if you want a crabby (sharky, prawny or even narwhaly) sticker, you can get it on @syudzius's RedBubble page.
See you on the finish line, folks! =)
I've got a working WEBGL version up now! If you play this version, your stats will persist on the leaderboard, but you won't be able to use that Player Name again once you quit. For this reason, I recommend the downloadable PC version, where you can continue to play as the same User and try to beat your own score. :)
I'm down to only needing about two more ratings! If you haven't checked out Debtors' Arena yet, I'd really appreciate a rating. And if I haven't already played your game, I'll be happy to rate you back. Procrastinators unite!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/debtors-arena
One of the main graphical features in our game Library of Madness is a wave effect that is applied to the screen as the main character spends their sanity to gain access to powerups.
Here's an example after the player has lost 5 sanity.
This is accomplished using a fairly simple vertex shader. (omitting colors, texture coords, etc.)
glsl
void main() {
vec3 newPos = vec3(
aVertexPosition.x + waveData.y * sin(waveData.x + aVertexPosition.x + aVertexPosition.y),
aVertexPosition.y + waveData.y * cos(waveData.x + aVertexPosition.x + aVertexPosition.y),
aVertexPosition.z
);
gl_Position = uPMatrix * vec4(newPos, 1.0);
}
waveData here is a uniform vec2 where x represents the current time, and y the amplitude of the wave. In our game, this amplitude is a function of the amount of sanity the player has lost equal to 0.5 * pow(insanity, 1.5).
This technique was copied from the water effect in this video, which used to have a tutorial to go with it.
It looks very different in our game because we apply the effect to the screen (i.e. an FBO that the game is initially rendered to) rather than the individual tiles. This results in one continuous twist, without multiples waves visible.
As a final detail to prevent uncovered area, the screen FBO is drawn eight extra times, flipped around the central screen. This isn't typically very noticeable, but could technically result in the player being visible twice on screen, if insanity was high enough and they were close enough to the edge of the map.
That's it! I hope you learned something or found this technique interesting.
Unfortunately, this edition was in sync with the most busy period of the year for me at work. Hopefully I can review some more games in the remaining 2 days. But i also need a bit of luck and help with 6 more reviews to reach the 20 mark. If you have a bit of free time here is my entry(is HTML5): https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/trading-lives I recommend playing it o mobile, seems more fun. :)
I've been doing LD for quite a few years now, but one game per jam was always more than enough. This time though, I really wanted to push myself. The last couple of LDs have been quite relaxed and laid back, so I decided to jam to the max this time around. I jammed at the Kokolores Collective in Ludwigsburg, Germany, together with my friends Kathrin and Kasi, and it was beyond amazing to work with you two! (I live in Berlin, but they had their housewarming party the Thursday before LD and so I went there for the whole week)
We first brainstormed around an hour on the theme and came up with a few interpretations we liked. We chose a mechanics-driven approach for our team game and worked from there (the story is thus a little abstract), but in the back of my mind I always had this narrative idea about cows and meat that I wanted to pursue. If there's time, I said to myself, not really believing it could be possible. So, most of Saturday, we worked together on our game, I did some code and story writing, as well as music and testing on Sunday, and we progressed quite well.
After having watched High School Musical (which was way more entertaining than I had expected ^^) to end this intense day, the other two left, we had a game that was pretty playable already and I started working on my own little entry. It was a very pleasant way of working, since due to the very little time I had for this game, everything was "good enough" pretty fast, so I made some decent progress that night.
After 5 hours of sleep. I spent Sunday working almost exclusively on that little game, which wasn't really planned, but came very naturally, since our team game seemed to also be progressing well without me (like mentioned above, I only did the music and some testing that day). We managed to finish the team game in the evening and it was in more than good enough shape, the other two left and I continued working. Three hours before the deadline (midnight in this part of the world) I was almost finished and doing some polish on the game, but that polish came in a very sad fashion (recording panicked cow sounds, doing sad music, reading facts about animal slaughter) and it really, really got to me. I was so sad that night and almost started crying, being all alone in a big, dimly lit office, deprived of sleep and feeling the weight of so many animals dying everyday to feed humanity. I couldn't go on anymore, but it was okay. I uploaded the final builds and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up, replenished, not terribly sad anymore, more melancholic, but above all proud and satisfied. It was a great weekend.
So, these are our games:
First up, limbostore.heaven, our team effort, that is quite polished, also has a bit of playtime, and that I am super proud of. We are still missing a few ratings to get to the magical 20 on this one, so I'd be forever grateful if you left us some feedback:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/limbostore-heaven
And secondly, my own little compo entry, My precious life, that is very short and not very interactive, but has grown close to my heart:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/my-precious-life
Making two games in 48 hours was intense and exhausting, but totally worth it. We had a lot of fun, learned a few new things and I'm very proud of what we created. Thanks for reading, cheers!
~ Erkberg ~
As we're nearing the results, I thought some rough stats were in order. DEADline :keyboard: was played nearly by 100 players since the online leaderboard was added and more than 1000 games were played.
(Coop sessions and runs with 4 or less finished words are not scored and I'm not sure how many uploads were blocked by firewalls and such).
Anyway, thank you all for playing. Here, have a bouquet for your troubles
Or course it comes in a Mrs. variant as well
If you have never tried a mashup of typing and platforming, you can do so in DEADline.
https://youtu.be/mJD4ixhbOY4
Added a new house model created last night :D Quite happy with the result, it fits well with the new weather system!
I'm still under 20 votes requirement so if you have a minute and want to help, feel free to Play & Rate here!
Hello! In a last-minute decision, Tech Valley Game Space decided to live-stream playing your game one more time! We'll be live shortly (ETA, 4:15 PM EST), and will be playing for at least 2 hours, so come submit your game: forms.gle/UPL87CT1QgQExLCT6
As the form states, we do enforce a Code of Conduct in our live-streams. As such, we do reserve the right to cancel streaming and rating a game for any reason.
We'll be streaming to the following channels:
For reference, the recording of our last live-stream is below; expect the same quality commentary this stream as well!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsydYDMYaj4